ETT staff welcomed us in the beautiful hall of Villa Fieschi in Sestri Ponente (Genoa) to take us on a wonderful journey through a century of industrial innovation in our city.

One hundred years ago, at the beginning of the Great War, Ansaldo Aeronautical Establishment was in this area of Genoa and here theshipwrights and carpenters of the navy built the first airplanes, made of wood and canvas as boats

After the war, the factory was converted. It was the era of the great ocean liners and workers adapted their skills to a new production,building furniture and decorations for the big ships.The shipbuilding industry was changing: the hulls were made of metal; the German and the English workers were much more competent of these new technologies.

But in the thirties, in the Ansaldo Shipyards, the gap in knowledge and technique had already been filled.The Rex, the most innovative ship in that time, was born few hundred meters from Villa Fieschi.The fluid dynamics of trout was studied to design the keel. It was the first big ship with air conditioning on board. This and other dozens ofinnovations made the Rex the most futuristic ship for its time.
The Rex was the most innovative ship, but also the fastest one. It broke the record in transatlantic crossing and grabbed the blue ribbon to the Germans. In a few years, Genoese workers achieved excellence in design and manufacture.

The time journey comes to the present. Even today (as yesterday) every innovation, even the most technological one, brings with itself achange and a community transformation, as the multidisciplinary team of ETT, a company founded in 2000 in Sestri Ponente.In recent years this reality has grown and has been able to transform, holding together different techniques and knowledge and finding a balance between what they can do and what they dream to be able to do.

Today ETT is a leader in the Digital Heritage arena and provides high technology services and systems to the market both in Italy and abroad.

During the visit ETT staff showed, for example, how Italian cultural heritage can be promoted, turning a simple visit to a museum in an authentic multi-sensory experience.
The participants had the opportunity to see innovative products designed for museums and exhibitions.

But ETT is very active also in Smart Tourism and Smart Interactive Learning areas, designing applications based on modern technologies like Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR).
Then during the visit everyone was able to enjoy immersive experiences using devices or wearing 3D viewers such as Google Glass, andSamsung Gear Oculus Rift VR.

The tour lasted about two hours and was really a success.
Let us quote some significant moments, hoping to receive you as our guests very soon:

Following the succesful experience of TT’s Special Envoys, this time we are glad to introduce you Nicola Ciulli, special envoy at Internet Festival 2015 in Pisa.

Nicola Ciulli is co-founder and head of Research & Development activities at Nextworks, an innovative & dynamic SME, based in Tuscany, Italy, with a lot of investment in R&D activities. He holds a degree in Telecommunication Engineering from the University of Pisa and SSSUP S. Anna (1997). He is a frequent keynote speaker representing SME perspectives on Future Internet & Networking contexts, and serves as external expert in EC evaluations, project reviews and call observations, with 10+ years of experience (FP6, FP7 and H2020)

The main goal was to discuss with invited experts from leading industries and researchers how Software Defined Networking, Network Function Virtualization and RINA can change and enhance the networks and the services in the Internet.
A unique opportunity for researchers, students and network enthusiasts to get highlights on the major strategic directions in this area, having also the opportunity to identify frameworks for engaging with the community of telcos, vendors and researchers who are implementing this Internet change.
The event has been sponsored by the PRISTINE project, funded by the European Commission under FP7, where Nextworks is participating.

The Internet has grown to a point that it interconnects billions of users, who run a wide range of networking application and exchange petabytes of data through the network. It is quite unanimous opinion that the Internet – and the packet network in general – innovated lifestyles and made obsolete the communications made possible by the traditional circuit switched telephone and television networks. However, the size, architecture and scope of the current Internet make innovation and long-term sustainability very difficult, since even minor changes happen through the accretion of point solutions

In the last decade networks, servers, storage technologies, and applications have all undergone significant changes with the introduction of virtualization, network overlays, and orchestration. Such technologies have allowed network operators and service providers to easily introduce a variety of (proprietary) hardware-based appliances in order to improve their network manageability as well as rapidly launch new services, keeping up with the pace of their users demand. The current Internet looks like a concatenation of networks with many distributed functions, implemented via a plethora of highly specialized middle boxes for firewalls, deep-packet inspection (DPI), Network Address Translation (NAT) , traffic scrubbing, etc. Software Defined Networking (SDN), Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), Service Function Chaining (SFC) and programmable network flow processing platforms, possibly based on commodity hardware, are emerging with the promise to evolve towards high flexibility the architecture of our networks

Similarly, the new traffic patterns (e.g. within the data centers) and the forecasted volumes of connected devices demand for a move beyond the current TCP/IP architecture of the Internet, to overcome limitations and constraints in layering, addressing, security, quality of service, mobility. RINA (Recursive InterNetwork Architecture) is emerging as clean slate network architecture based on the fundamental principle that networking is only distributed inter-process communication.

Nicola Ciulli

So thanks to TalenTour’s Special Envoy Nicola Ciulli for telling us about the Evolution and Revolution in the Internet